State of Fear

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In this tale of eco-warriors gone mad, it's the plot you've got
to watch, writes John Birmingham.

State of Fear
By Michael Crichton
HarperCollins, 624pp, $23.95

As a rule, reviews that dwell on a book's cover are not be
trusted. It is almost always a sign that the critic has not done
his homework properly.

With that caveat in mind, I cannot help but briefly dwell on the
cover of Michael Crichton's State of Fear. It is impossible
to tell from the cover that Crichton's latest mega-seller is about
eco-terrorism and that the reader will be subjected to a 600-page
diatribe about the perfidy of the green movement. Picking it up in
an airport bookstore, you could be forgiven for thinking you're
about to purchase a high-tech espionage thriller set against the
War on Terror.

You're not.

State of Fear is ostensibly about a James Bond-like
conspiracy by green nutters to alert the world to the threat of
environmental disaster by manufacturing a couple of environmental
disasters. When Crichton sticks to this script he produces a number
of agreeable set-piece action sequences which keep the pages
turning and will doubtless form the basis of a $100-million
Hollywood adaptation.

What you probably won't see on the big screen are the many long,
self-indulgent passages where Crichton hammers home the real point
of his novel. As one of his characters puts it, "The threat of
global warming is essentially non-existent. Even if it were a real
phenomenon it would probably result in a net benefit to most of the
world."

A sizeable chunk of the book is given over to quoting research
to prove this point. It's the sort of thing you can expect to see
turning up on Media Watch in the near future as right-wing talkback
hosts quote slabs of Crichton, with or without attribution, in the
never-ending quest to make the world safe for Exxon and BP.

If this doesn't bother you - and most techno-thrillers do come
with a heavy philosophical bias towards the right - you'll probably
enjoy State of Fear. However, it is by no means Crichton's
best work. The story advances as an environmental scientist turned
super agent, Professor John Kenner, drags idealistic young attorney
Peter Evans from one life-threatening adventure to the next. The
characters are cardboard cut-outs and the dialogue often risible
when it's not tone deaf - but again that's not an indictment of
this sort of book.

State of Fear falls down in its credibility. Not so much
in the environmental science, which is merely boring after the
first lecture, but mostly in the plotting. Green villains
assassinate their enemies by wrestling them to the ground and
pressing a blue-ringed octopus into their armpits. Why not just
shoot them? Did they learn nothing from Batman? And Kenner, who is
portrayed as having a direct line into the top levels of the
military and big business, never once dials up their help. Even at
the end of the book, when our heroes are trapped between mad
greenies and primitive cannibals, it doesn't occur to him that he
could just ask a nearby military force to intervene.

It's bad writing and it lets the reader ignore the larger point
Crichton is trying to make.